Future Dallas: A Special Report

The gap behind the gleam

Prized projects mask growing poverty that challenges the city

Like its unofficial symbol Pegasus, Dallas has long felt inspired to soar above its humble origins on the North Texas prairie. The city is flying high again with big-ticket projects drawing raves from residents and visitors alike.

The trendy Klyde Warren Park, the iconic Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge and the Arts District have re-energized neighborhoods in and around downtown.

But while an aura of wealth has shaped the image of Dallas, and some of the world’s richest people live here, the facts on the ground are more humbling: The city is growing poorer. The percentage of Dallas residents living below the poverty line grew from 18 percent to 24 percent over the past decade.

More than most of its peers, Dallas has become a city of “haves” and “have-nots” — without much in between.

Of the 561 largest cities in the United States, only 24 are worse than Dallas, as determined by the Census Bureau’s Gini index, which measures income inequality across the nation. Among Dallas’ peers, only two, Boston and Washington, are worse.

Dallas’ income inequality is one of several urban issues examined in “Future Dallas,” a 20-page special section published today in The Dallas Morning News and also at dallasnews.com/futuredallas.

Through comparative metrics and expert sources, “Future Dallas” looks at an array of challenges facing the country’s ninth-largest city. The report comes 10 years after The News published “Dallas at the Tipping Point,” an in-depth report card that benchmarked Dallas against other peer cities.

The special section also comes as two high-profile conferences are set to take place in Dallas. The New Cities Summit, at the Dallas Arts District Tuesday through Thursday, is expected to draw hundreds of city leaders, thinkers and innovators from around the world to focus on re-imagining cities. The U.S. Conference of Mayors will hold its annual summer meeting at the Omni Dallas Hotel from Friday through June 23.

Dallas’ income gap prompted Larry James, a longtime Dallas advocate for the poor, to observe: “Dallas is the poorest rich town in America.”

The breadth and depth of poverty in Dallas is top of mind for Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings. “That trend is not going in the right direction. That to me is very, very concerning,” he said.

The growing number of poor residents is symptomatic of the city’s inability to find solutions to troubled schools and chronic unemployment.

Another symptom: The outflow of middle-class families seeking better schools to the suburbs. Employers needing a skilled workforce follow the same route. Case in point: In late April, Toyota announced it is moving its U.S. headquarters from Southern California to Plano — not Dallas — bringing with it about 4,000 jobs to the northern suburb.

The now defunct Forest Theater in south Dallas (left) and currently operating Lakewood Theater in East Dallas. (G.J. McCarthy/The Dallas Morning News)

Sobering judgment

Ten years ago, the “Tipping Point” special report concluded with this sobering judgment: Far from being a top-tier city, Dallas rated near the bottom of its peers on three critical issues identified by Dallas residents as their top concerns — crime, education and economic growth.

In the past decade, only one of these three areas — public safety — has shown clear improvement.

Key economic indicators have remained unchanged or have grown worse during the past decade. The city has lost jobs, ranking third-worst among 23 cities, after Memphis and Detroit. Texas’ other four large cities saw job growth in that time.

Household income in Dallas grew at a meager rate of 1.6 percent between 2005 and 2012 — compared with a Texas average of 2.6 percent and a U.S. average of 1.8 percent.

At the same time, Dallas has made positive strides. The city’s property tax base has increased by more than 35 percent since 2004 and is outperforming neighboring suburbs, city officials said.

The city’s sales tax revenue is forecast to be $30 million above its pre-recession peak, and city officials say that the Dallas Design District, Shops at Park Lane, West Village, Bishop Arts District and Trinity Groves are strengthening the city’s retail market.

The DART light rail network is expanding: The Green Line was completed in 2010 and the connection to Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport will open later this year.

But if the future belongs to the educated, Dallas’ prospects look less bright. The city lags far behind peer cities in college degrees. From 2000 to 2012, the number of college-educated residents has grown at less than half the national average.

Compared with 22 other peer cities, Dallas was next-to-last in the rate of growth in college-educated population. (Detroit was last.)

For the last 10 years, Dallas has focused on big-ticket projects. But when readers were asked to share their thoughts on how the city could be improved, The News received more than 300 responses on social media postings, email and postal letters, with many citing the need for more basic city services.

“Maybe we should quit building ridiculously extravagant bridges and look at projects that might really benefit the city,” said Chuck Miller.

“They need to quit building fancy highways, hotels, parks, bridges and fix all the streets with potholes,” said Cindy Medina.

More appeal

Still, Rawlings said the city has more appeal than it did 10 years ago.

As evidence, he points to the burst of growth in Uptown that has lured many young professionals to work, eat and live there. Among them are his two adult children, who have moved back to the city, he said.

“What’s happened in Uptown in recent years is remarkable,” Rawlings said. “You’ve got thousands of people living there in some of the most valuable real estate going.”

The mayor rejects the either/or proposition that the city must choose between focusing on basic services or high-profile projects. “I believe you’ve got to have the right mix of that,” he said. “If it’s all about potholes, you’ll never attract those young people I’m talking about.”

The question is whether the young people who have moved to the city will stay here after they settle down and start having kids, he said. “That is the big question,” he said. “Is this just a little boom we’re having right now, or is this a big step towards the next step?

“That’s why I keep coming back to education,” the mayor said. “It’s about your family, where you’re going to live and your quality of life.”

James, the head of CitySquare, a Dallas nonprofit devoted to fighting poverty, is leading a task force created by the mayor to find solutions that can help the poor immediately.

Roots of poverty

In Dallas — and in Texas as a whole — entrenched poverty is rooted in several issues, James said, including a mismatch of skills for work available, the lack of a living wage for the kinds of jobs available to the poor, and state government policies that reject expansion of the Medicaid program.

The national impression of Dallas is that it does things on a big scale, James said, and the city has only added to that reputation in recent years.

“Think about it, the Arts District is world class. The Design District emerging on the Trinity River, the beautiful bridge, the Perot Museum, the sports franchises, they’re such grand things here,” James said.

Far less publicity was generated when the mayor showed up for a recent groundbreaking for an $8.2 million housing development near Deep Ellum for the homeless, James said. But it was a grand step nonetheless.

“We do big things in Dallas,” James recalled the mayor saying, “but until we do big things for the least of our neighbors, we’re not as big as we think we are.”